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Militants waging an Islamist insurgency in Russia's mainly Muslim North Caucasus region have proposed using either Arabic or a Turkic language as a lingua franca for their affairs.

A decade after Moscow drove separatists from power in Chechnya in the second of two wars, rebels stage near-daily attacks in the North Caucasus, and many want to carve out a separate state from Russia and impose Islamic sharia law.The insurgents now communicate with each other largely in Russian, also the main language of the dozen or so Islamist web sites they are affiliated with, and of their video addresses.

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Arabic, the voice of the Koran, was proposed due to its status as "the language of Islam," while a Turkic group language was suggested due to the historical and linguistic links of dozens of languages spoken in the North Caucasus.

Last week a member of the Caucasus Emirate, Abu Zaid, posted a long appeal on kavkazcenter.com in favor of Arabic as a state language for the Caucasus Emirate, calling it "the international language of jihad (holy war)."